Category: Public Safety

During the times of the COVID-plague, it has been recommended that people maintain “social distancing”—keeping apart by approximately six feet.

The issue:

Unfortunately, this advice is difficult to follow in many situations, for example, on public transit, in an elevator, etc.

Fig. 1: Social distancing is easy when there is no one else around (left), but in a crowded situation (for example, in a supermarket or building lobby), people tend to cluster together (right).

Proposal:

This snake-based “sssssssssocial distancing” plan involves training a territorial species of snake to wrap itself around a person and then give a bit of a nibble to anyone who comes within six feet of it (Figure 2).

Fig. 2: The snake will need to be at least 10 feet long in order to have six feet of length remaining after it has coiled around the person who it is defending.

It might end up being uncomfortable to have the snake coiled around its host / owner, so one improvement could be carrying the snake in a backpack or some kind of modified wrestling championship belt.

Conclusion:

This system would also help discourage “close talkers” who do not respect a person’s need for personal space.

PROS: May reduce the spread of plague, creates valuable jobs for snakes.

CONS: You will probably get a different snake-borne plague instead.

Special Economic Note:

If there is high enough coverage of this system, costs may be reduced by requiring only three feet of snake coverage per person, and relying on the two independently-carried snakes to provide the total six-foot distance.

Thus, it is important to encourage widespread adoption of this system in order to make it more economical on a per-unit basis.

Unfortunately, people generally feel, psychologically speaking, that their hands are clean immediately upon rinsing them with even the slightest hint of water.

The challenge, therefore, is to encourage people to wash their hands for the recommended 30-ish seconds.

Although hand washing timers already exist, these are not sufficient—they don’t enforce the washing time.

Proposal:

To improve on the existing “hand washing timer” product, we will enhance the sink’s faucet with a “wash hands” button (Figure 2) that can control the faucet to perform pre-programmed behavior.

Fig. 2: A regular sink (left), and a modified sink with a “wash hands” button (right). A user who wants to, say, fill a water bottle, would use the sink normally. But a user who just wanted to wash their hands would press the wash button instead of interacting with the faucet handle.

When the wash button is pressed, the tap performs the following actions (shown in timeline form in Figure 3):

The tap turns on for ~5 seconds, allowing the user to get their hands wet.

The tap turns down to a trickle for 20 seconds (allowing the user to wash their hands, but not providing enough water to wash off the soap)

Finally, the tap turns on again, allowing the user to wash the soap off their hands.

Fig. 3: Here, we see the timeline of water flow (Y-axis: flow rate. X-axis: time since the button was pressed). The interval lengths could be adjusted as desired.

Bonus fact:

Apparently water temperature doesn’t make a difference: “Contrary to popular belief however, scientific studies have shown that using warm water has no effect on reducing the microbial load on hands” (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand_washing). You can fact check that one yourself, if you want!

PROS: May reduce the spread of deadly deadly.

CONS: Could increase the rate of dry hands; this discomfort must be weighed against the severity of any to-be-prevented plagues.

In large cities, there are many perils for pedestrians: cars, bicycles, motorcycles, horses, etc.

Even the sidewalk is not a safe zone from scooters and bicycles!

At night, the problems are even worse, since pedestrians are generally un-illuminated and are frequently wearing all-black coats in the winter months.

Proposal:

Since many commuters carry a laptop bag, briefcase, or purse, it would be easy to put some sort of high-visibility indicator on this object: for example, an LED light (see animated designer laptop bag in Figure 1).

This would be less intrusive than wearing a high-visibility vest, and might be an easier sell to fashion-conscious commuters.

Militaries generally have physical fitness requirements and a maximum age cutoff for enlistees.

The issue:

Unfortunately, in most countries, these standards completely exclude government officials from boots-on-the-ground participation in any military operations.

This is unfair to those officials: they performed the diplomatic and logistical preparation for war, yet are prevented from obtaining direct personal experience with its outcome.

Proposal:

The proposal is simple: a “high-ranking government official” waiver that would allow an individual to enlist in the military and serve in a combat area even if they would normally be disqualified (e.g. due to being “too old,” having flat feet, being unable to pass boot camp, etc.).

Since these not-meeting-standards individuals could be a liability as far as actual military effectiveness is concerned, there could be a few restrictions on these “high-ranking official” waivers:

The waivers would only be issued to top government officials.

Only a small number of waivers would be issued. A lottery could be instituted in order to select from the eligible candidates.

The tour of duty could be limited, perhaps to a year or less.

Fig. 1: Although highly-ranked government officials are, on average, too old to be eligible for military positions in most countries, this special exemption would allow them to serve anyway.

This could have the following additional benefits as well:

Increases the ability of these officials to identify wasteful spending in geographical regions that would normally have minimal oversight due to their remoteness.

In countries with less stable governments, integration of civilian legislators with the armed forces might reduce the chance of a military coup. (Or possibly facilitate it, Julius Caesar style.)

PROS: Helps ensure synchronization between a country’s government and its associated military.

CONS: May be disruptive to lawmaking; unclear how international diplomacy would be impacted if a crucial high-ranking official could be suddenly whisked off to a foreign war.

Certain mountains require that climbers obtain a permit before embarking.

Sometimes these can be expensive, but rarely is any mountaineering competency required. Everest permits, which are issued by the government of Nepal, cost approximately $10,000 (Wikipedia link).

The issue:

If too many people are crowded onto a narrow high-altitude route, disaster can result from increased amount of time that climbers spend in the inhospitable low-temperature and low-oxygen environment.

Proposal:

Instead of just giving out Everest permits to anyone who can pay the fee, why not make a climber show their dedication by first requiring that they summit a less deadly mountain?

Specifically, the climber must obtain a physical “summit eligibility token” from the summit of an easier peak, as shown in Figure 1.

This token—plus the standard entry fee—would then be required for climbing a more difficult mountain.

Fig. 1: Left: the leftmost mountain is not too difficult, and can be climbed without a permit. On the top of that mountain is a token that will permit the climber to attempt the mountain shown in the middle of the diagram, and so on.

In order to make things slightly more interesting, the token is not just a simple card or coin, but is an extremely heavy metal ingot (Figure 2).

The climber would have to show their mountaineering prowess by somehow lugging this heavy ingot all the way back down the mountain.

Fig. 2: The more advanced tokens are also heavier; in this case, the “Everest eligibility” token is a 20 kilogram (44 lb.) copper ingot. Restocking these ingots would be easy: they could simply be airdropped from a plane or helicopter, since the exact placement of the ingots is not crucial, as long as they are in the general vicinity of the peak.

Conclusion:

The Everest gatekeepers should adopt this idea, and should immediately start designing some interesting eligibility ingots (and figuring out which mountains they should go on).

PROS: Sets a lower bound on the amount of unqualified-ness of a prospective mountain climber, which may reduce the number of mountaineering fatalities.

In most American cities, four-way intersections with stoplights are the most common form of traffic control.

The issue:

As a pedestrian, these intersections are frustrating: if the stoplights are not synchronized, you’ll randomly encounter red lights while walking from block to block. But even when lights are synchronized, they are synchronized for car driving speeds. Thus, at normal walking speed, a pedestrian will inevitably spend a large fraction of travel time waiting at crosswalks for the light to turn green.

Although a pedestrian can increase or decrease their walking speed, it is difficult to select an optimal speed without knowing exactly when the light will change.

Proposal:

Fortunately, a phone app can easily measure walking speed and distance to the next traffic light, and then display a recommended walking speed that will get a pedestrian to the light when it is green (Figure 1).

Fig. 1: Since this phone knows how far the next light is and exactly when the light will change, it can recommend a walking pace that will get its owner to the light while the light is green. The green / gray arrow in the middle of the screen is a “progress bar,” showing the pedestrian’s current position relative to the previous intersection (base of arrow) and the next light (tip of arrow).

Using this app, a person can enjoy both a more leisurely pace at lights they’d miss anyway, and can walk ever-so-slightly faster (Figure 2) in order to make it through intersections just before the light turns red.

Fig. 2: In the top example (A), a pedestrian walks at a uniform pace that causes them to have to wait at two of the three lights. In the bottom example (B), the pedestrian is using our new app, and adjusts their walking speed to hit all the lights while they are green. Recommended walking speed is shown by the orange bar at the very bottom.

Conclusion:

This type of app would probably work for drivers and bicyclists as well (ideally through audio instructions).

CONS: Users of this app might wait at fewer lights, but would be at higher risk of being run over by a car / bicyclist / steamroller while distracted by the app’s various recommendations and statistics.

Every year, a large number of children accidentally poison themselves by drinking household chemicals. Cleaning products and pesticides (Figure 1) represent the cause of ~15% of poisoning cases in children under the age of 6, according to the National Capital Poison Center.

Fig. 1: Many relatively common household products are deadly if ingested by humans.

The issue:

To a child who is illiterate and unfamiliar with conventional warning markings (e.g., a skull), a deadly chemical might plausibly seem like an interesting beverage (Figure 2). Some poisonous substances, like antifreeze, even have an appealing sugary taste.

Fig. 2: If you find yourself asking “why would anyone, even a child, drink something that is so OBVIOUSLY poison,” consider the perplexity that you yourself would face if required to distinguish foreign-language-labeled energy drinks from automotive fluids. Transmission fluid, or energy drink? Who knows!

Proposal:

The idea is simple: to put a special “decoy” beverage into locations with deadly substances that a child (or pet!) might theoretically get into.

This “decoy” beverage is designed to cause vomiting (and a generally unpleasant experience), to discourage further sampling of the (actually poisonous) chemicals stored in the same area.

Additionally, this would inform the theoretically-paying-attention adults in a home that their “child-proof” cabinet locks had failed to work.

Since this “lure” beverage (Figure 3) would ideally be be the first substance consumed, it should be made to look as appealing as possible, with:

A convenient easy-open cap

A supplementary straw

Colorful eye-catching images on the outside. Maybe even a cartoon mascot!

A translucent container to show off the delicious liquid within

Obviously the container should also contain a description of the nature of the product, so that no one outside of the target demographic (i.e. the “about to drink a container of antifreeze” demographic) accidentally drinks it.

Fig. 3: The “decoy” container is designed to be as easy-to-drink and appealing as possible, since it has to be the first under-cabinet substance that is ingested. If it’s the second-most-appealing liquid, then it might as well not even be present.

Fig. 4: Here’s what an under-sink cabinet might look like with the new non-injurious “decoy” substance. Hopefully this will look more appealing than the rat poison or antifreeze!

Conclusion:

Research would be needed to see if the PRO and CON listed below cancel each other out, or perhaps even result in more poison ingestion than before!

PROS: This might actually legitimately work, and would cost almost nothing to produce, since it is just “existing non-deadly emetic plus re-designed product label.”

CONS: The appealing container could attract a child to investigate the “cabinet of deadly chemicals” when they would previously have ignored it. This could lead to the exact opposite of what we are trying to accomplish!